With the Bangladesh Nationalist Party boycott, 153 out of 300 seats were elected unopposed-essentially doing away with competitive races in more than half of the country’s parliamentary contests. The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the election in protest of the government’s decision to scrap a law that requires Parliament to be dissolved in advance of elections and replaced by a neutral caretaker administration that oversees the poll. This slide into authoritarianism, which certainly would not be new for a nation that has experienced fifteen years of military rule over its forty-seven-year-old history, has been long in the making, they write for The National Interest:īack in 2014, the Awami League was reelected in a poll that many outside observers deemed to be far from credible the EU even declined to send election observers. One of the harshest assessments comes from a March 2018 Bertellsmann Stiftung report, which classifies Bangladesh as an autocracy because it “no longer meets minimum standards for democracy,” such as fair elections.īangladesh is looking less and less democratic by the day. Between 20, it fell from 85th to 92nd out of 167 countries in the Economic Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. By any measure, the current state of democracy in Bangladesh is grim, note analysts Atif Ahmad, a researcher at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia and deputy director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center:īangladesh ranks 144th out of 180 countries in Reporters without Borders’ press freedom index ranking.

Democracy 3 crashing